Playing the hate card

RACISM has again entered American political discourse and there's little Barack Obama can do about it.

AFTER months of simmering right-wing dissent against the Obama administration and a protest march by about 70,000 conservatives in Washington, former president Jimmy Carter declared that most opposition to President Barack Obama was rooted in racism.

He was responding to the unprecedented heckling of a sitting president from the floor of Congress by a good old boy from South Carolina, Joe Wilson.

"Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care. It's deeper than that," Carter said.

"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man ... That racism inclination still exists.

"And I think it's bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the south but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country."

Few words would have caused Obama more heartburn. Obama has, from the start, emphasised the non-racial and post-racial aspects of his politics. He feared that if he were to become the black president, rather than the president who happens to be black, something deep in the American psyche would kick in, and he would be marginalised for good.

In the election campaign, Sarah Palin used codewords, saying Obama was not a "real American" but somehow he remained unscathed. The closest Obama came to racial immolation was when Fox News broadcast clips of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright yelling "God damn America!". But he rescued himself with a speech of such sweep and candour that even his fiercest critics relented.

He lost a lot of the white vote to John McCain, of course. And the vote swung to the Republicans in the Appalachians, where racism is strongest. But McCain refused to run a race-baiting campaign.

Americans felt good about electing their first black president, but they can be hypocritical when race issues are raised. In July, Obama backed Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor arrested at his home by a white policeman. Obama said the policeman had acted "stupidly", a comment that sparked a week of controversy. But when Obama called rapper Kanye West a "jackass" last week for interrupting the MTV Video Music Awards, he was widely praised.

"He calls Kanye a jackass - one of the most famous African-Americans in the world - and gets kudos," says Michael Eric Dyson, a sociologist from Georgetown University in Washington. "But when he calls an anonymous white guy stupid by implication, he has to nearly apologise to the nation. How dare a black man stand in judgment of white intelligence? Yet he can go on and hammer Kanye West, who is more accomplished than the police officer and better known."

After Obama's election victory, it seemed as if the weight of history had been lifted. But now it looks as if his election was the beginning and not the end of this racial narrative. However, it's important to note that Carter is almost certainly exaggerating. Obama has lost some lustre but he remains popular with approval ratings above 50 per cent. He's put through changes, from the stimulus package to support for the car industry, to an outreach to the Muslim world, to a plan to overhaul health insurance.

Nonetheless, Carter wasn't merely posturing. He knows the south and most Americans can pick up on nuances utterly lost to outsiders. Remember also that Obama won few white southern votes.

And there is a tone to the conversation recently that suggests part of the country finds it hard to accept Obama. As soon as he ceased to be a mere symbolic president and started to change things, the resistance suddenly became fierce and irrational.

Of course some attacks on him will be partly racist because the racial divide is still a big factor in US partisan competition. The Right was reborn after the civil rights struggle. Before Lyndon Johnson's determination to protect black voting and education, the south was Democratic. After Johnson took on civil rights, Richard Nixon's and Ronald Reagan's strategy of appealing to white southerners who were enraged by black equality was critical to winning. The Democrats believed that race was a factor in this realignment.

The Democrats now constitute the majority in much of the country once ruled by Republicans - the northeast, midwest and west - and have much less traction in the south. You also have a black Democratic president, a concept that would have been incredible to the older white generations that grew up with segregation. US politics is driven by reason and debate, but also by symbolism, emotion and sentiment.

And so when a white congressman calls the president a liar, there is a contempt in his voice that means something to Americans. There is, in The New York Times's columnist Maureen Dowd's mind, an unheard "You lie, boy!" in it. And in last year's campaign, a Kentucky congressman did indeed say of Obama: "I'm going to tell you something: that boy's finger does not need to be on the button."

What are we to make of the fact that in opinion polls, a majority of Republicans in the south doubt that Obama is an American citizen? In Virginia, which Obama won, 70 per cent of Republican voters believe he is not legitimately president because he was, they believe, born in Kenya. Last week, a poll found that a third of Republicans in New Jersey believe that Obama was not born in the US. And 17 per cent of self-described conservatives in the same survey say they believe he is the Antichrist. What explains this if not racism and xenophobia? Obama is refusing to take the bait but he cannot be under any illusions that it's out there. The Washington marchers' horror at what they called a fascist and a communist president requires no racial subtext: just good old American paranoia and extremism, which can be found on Right and Left. But it exists, and it's silly to pretend that just because a black president was elected, it suddenly vanished.

There are elements on the far Right who are clearly trying to stir up racial animosity by seizing on random events and trying to polarise the country and thereby polarise the country against Obama. The radical populist Glenn Beck said on Fox News that Obama has "exposed himself as a guy (with) a deep-seated hatred for white people". He offered no evidence for this: he just put it out there and refused to retract.

Last week, in a baldly racist diatribe, the biggest figure in the conservative movement, Rush Limbaugh, noticed that there had been a ruckus on a school bus in which a white kid was stomped on by a black kid. The incident, it turned out, was a classic school-bus bully story: the white kid was being tormented and the bullies were refusing to let him sit down. There was no racial rhetoric in a bus full of black and white kids.

Limbaugh, America's most prominent radio talk-back host, then mocked what he sees as political correctness. "We know that white students are destroying civility on buses, white students destroying civility in classrooms all over America, white congressmen destroying civility in the House of Representatives." Get the picture? There's an implication that a racist president is actively trying to hurt white America. Despite the local police chief's insistence that race had nothing to do with the incident, Limbaugh simply declared:

"I think the guy's wrong. I think not only was it racism, it was justifiable racism. I mean, that's the lesson we're being taught here today. Kid shouldn't have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses. This is Obama's America."

"We came unarmed (this time)" read one poster in Washington last weekend. Was that a sterling defence of the second amendment's assurance of the right to bear arms? Or something of a threat? We do not know. But what we do know is that this kind of discourse is not only ugly but dangerous. Fomenting a race war to undermine a black president is incendiary, perilous stuff. This is a country that has shot its most charismatic presidents.

And Limbaugh is not weighing the pros and cons of particular policies. "I wanted him to fail from the get-go," was his refrain last week. And if racial hatred can help Limbaugh find a way to force Obama to fail, he has no hesitation in using it.

Beneath the surface there is considerable cultural anxiety. The US is not the country it used to be. It's far more racially diverse than in any previous era, and the demographics show that without black and Hispanic votes, the Republicans may be consigned to long-term electoral doom.

The collapse of the conservative movement under George W. Bush has left many bewildered and angry. A majority-minority country beckons and the Right is as scared as it is furious. They voted Republican and debt exploded, spending went through the roof, two wars became quagmires and gay marriage came to America. This leads to paranoia and unruliness. But there is something a little different this time, and it's because the president is a little different this time.

One of the most common signs last weekend said simply, "I want my country back". This could be a response to the huge increase in government power under Bush and during the financial crisis, continued by Obama. Or it could be a cry of racial, cultural panic. Or, it could be a fusion of the two that renders the entire picture extremely volatile.

One way to mitigate this would be for Republicans to craft policies that might appeal more to blacks and Hispanics, to recruit minorities and to embrace immigrants. But another way is to so racially polarise the US that so many white votes flee from the black president that a Republican is elected by whites alone. Obama understands that if he were to take this bait, and attack the racism out there, he would lose. Limbaugh understands this too. And so in the cultural context, Limbaugh is all about riling people up and Obama is all about calming them down. It's a war of nerves that Obama needs to transform into something much less compelling. He has to bore his way towards acceptance.

Limbaugh, on the other hand, makes a fortune from such forays into the gutter and has no incentive to stop. The key for him is to generate a narrative that compounds Obama's race with his policies. And so Obama's policies are shredded daily while Limbaugh plays ditties such as "Barack, the magic negro", and calls the president a "halfrican".

Obama, on the other hand, knows that a racially polarised US will be too distracted to address health insurance reform or climate change or the debt or the wars. And so he has to somehow plough on through the racial minefield, denying the racial angle, and hoping that reason will eventually triumph.

The Sunday Times